Did He or Didn’t He Know About His Benefits?

By |September 2, 2010

A hat tip to Chris Prevatt over at The Liberal OC for catching yet another inconsistency in Santa Ana’s story about Mayor Miguel Pulido’s health benefits.

Prevatt points out that Pulido is on the record saying he did indeed know he was getting health benefits from both the city and the Orange County Transportation Authority.

As Voice of OC reported last week, taxpayers are contributing a total of about $33,000 to Pulido’s health care each year, $15,000 from Santa Ana and about $18,000 annually from OCTA, where he serves on the board of directors.

Pulido told an Orange County Register interviewer that he knew about both benefits, but “I didn’t understand any other ramifications.”

But Santa Ana City Manager David Ream said in a letter this week that Pulido’s city health insurance was provided from 2007 through this year “without [the mayor’s] knowledge, participation and/or consent.”

OCTA policy requires directors to pay 100 percent of the cost of their health insurance if they also are covered by another agency.

Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer has escalated his long-running feud with fellow Supervisor Shawn Nelson, introducing measures this week that ban the kind of double-dipping from taxpayer funds that Nelson and his chief of staff have long engaged in.